While the series boasts some impressive speakers, including Yale law professor Robert Post and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb, it’s unlikely to accomplish much. Administrators at Brown — like so many of their ivory tower counterparts — refuse to see this censoring species of activism for what it is: an assault on the foundational values of the university.

Indeed, it’s not clear Brown’s top brass see it as a threat at all. At its most recent commencement, one student speaker named Sabrina Imbler — handpicked by the administration — defended the activist outburst that killed the newspaper column as necessary to “defend our humanity.” And the school recently appointed to an associate deanship Professor Tricia Rose, who is known to prompt students to literally pledge allegiance to her politics.

It’s not new for college students to indulge in self-righteous certainty, to be so intoxicated by a grand moral mission that they can’t see any value in hearing what the other side has to say. What is new: administrators who bend to their will.

Late last fall, after a campus police officer allegedly assaulted a visiting latino student named Geovanni Cuevas, students openly threatened to oust President Paxson if she didn’t breach due process protocols. Soon thereafter, transgender author Janet Mock was bullied into cancelling a speech by online petitioners objecting to her chosen venue, the local chapter of the Jewish group Hillel. And activists disrupted a white alum’s performance of Hindu chants, pelting her with breathless accusations of “cultural appropriation.” In every case, the administration’s response was limp or non-existent.

President Paxson would no doubt label these excesses as anomalies, claiming that critics ignore the wider, vital conversations about race, class and gender that vigorous student activism stimulates.

As a college freshman at Brown 15 years ago, I had a lot of those conversations, usually in the perfectly clichéd setting of a shaggy dorm room, fueled by cheap vodka and scored to Lilith Fair’s greatest hits. Those moments were intellectually transformative: having been raised in a cushy Los Angeles suburb and funneled through a pipeline of expensive private schools, I had, shockingly, a severely limited perspective on just about everything.

Such conversations, though, depend on a shared commitment to intellectual openness — and the kind of activism infecting Brown and other campuses all over the country explicitly rejects the value of such openness. Students are on a hair-trigger, eager to turn minor slights into examples of “structural” oppression and assume nefarious motives in critics. They regularly deploy an insidious rhetorical sleight-of-hand that equates the mental discomfort of hearing adverse opinions with real, physical violence. Those who question affirmative action, rape culture or other planks of the prevailing campus orthodoxy aren’t just wrong; they’re making the campus "unsafe."

These tactics don't spark conversation. They choke it off. And left unchecked, the activists peddling them will continue to degrade the campus climate President Paxson and other college administrators claim to value.

This summer, I released a documentary about Brown’s controversies on We the Internet TV. Since then, I’ve heard from hundreds of concerned Brown alumni, faculty, and students, all of whom — just like me — are desperate for the university to stand up firmly for open inquiry, to stand up firmly for itself. We’re still waiting.

Rob Montz, a 2005 graduate of Brown, is a fellow at the Moving Picture Institute. Find his work at RobMontz.com.​